"Not So Quiet Storm" b/w "Pennywhistles and Me"

Pete Macia e-mailed a couple of days ago and asked me to write this column about "the two police tasing incidents this week-- Two Gallants and Ali from St. Lunatics-- and the difference in reaction" between them, but he was too late, so I thought I'd let him speak for him. Besides, there's a new Omarion single out.

Nigh one year has passed since I have mentioned Omarion Grandberry: an exercise in restraint. A little background: What with Usher wooing audiences on Broadway, R. Kelly facing time in the can, Ne-Yo not really exciting me anymore, and Pharrell doing…whatever?...Omarion, better known to you and yours as "Thee Mighty O," is where I have invested most of my hope for an interesting young pop / R&B man-crooner with a still-burgeoning career and long-term staying power. His voice, a nimble tenor with a slight snag beneath it, can emote a full range of relationship issues effectively: In his capacity as humble fellow, he is believably devotional in his music-- which is useful when investing get-freaky club joints with nice-boy depth, the kind that that fellows like Usher and Pharrell haven't been able to get at since they became their own #1 Stunnas (confidence is important, egomania distracting).

However, because of Omarion's past as the alpha male in cherry-picked boy band B2K-- and after his star-turn in You Got Served wherein it was discovered he smooches tongue out, eyes open-- he hasn't been as on-our-tongues Ne-Yo, nor is he quite as visible as Chris Brown. His break-out time as Hot Newcomer came in 1999. Do you even remember anything that happened before 9/11? We're used to Omarion's trusty grin, his easy fluidity, leaving him to release scorching-hot single after scorching-hot single without, and videos in which he is entirely naked from the waist up, delivering lines like, "Think I wanna bite you," without too much brouhaha.

O's 2005 album, titled simply O, produced the sleeper dance-floor track "Touch" (one of Pharrell's best beats of last year). It was, in fact, a full album of ridiculous cuts, from ballad to banger, and virtually no filler. Earlier this year, Omarion dropped "Entourage", a single from the forthcoming 21; it was another unpresumptuous club track whose synth popped around his voice, his lyrics sweet but not too sticky. A jam long on breeziness and Gap Band-influenced charm, "Entourage" was also the kind of song we've come to expect from our dude – solid dancables with maximum magnitude for chicks like me. "21," I thought. "Finna be another hot one." But I was not inspired to think new things about Omarion.

THAT IS! UNTIL I HEARD "ICE BOX"!

"Ice Box" is Omarion's new ballad! IT IS R&B FOR EMO LOVERS. And it is an important song in his career, because it's the first that invests him with a time and place: In California, in 2006, and one of the first r&b singers to have come of age during third-wave emo and apply that influence to his own music. A native of Los Angeles, the O's voice has acquired a tinge of West Coast punky nasal, which serves him well on the dramatic chorus, which is straight out of New Found Glory's diary: "I GOT THIS ICE BOX WHERE MY HEART USED TO BE." A little goth, too, non? Timbaland, producer of the song's dramatic synths and the cavernous effects, helps O's cause immensely by adding a wrought back-up vocal: "I'm so cold, I'm so cold, I'm so cold, I'm so cold," he sings, and does, in fact, sound as if he were afflicted with hypothermia. The song is, of course, about a failing relationship, and features the melodrama and style of contemporary emo. But here's where the "r&b" of this R&Bemo trailblazer comes in: Instead of scapegoating or vilifying the ex-girlfriend, Omarion "really wanna work this out, damn girl, I'm trying," and lists all of her positive qualities. Pure 100% Omarion: he doesn't mean no disrespect. He even said as much in a song.

Of course, nobody pays attention to genre anymore. But the only recent high-viz attempts at this type of crossover have resulted in disastrous collabos (Mary J Blige & Bono dueting "One") or baby-stepping mash-up acts (Jay-Z and Linkin Park, which is better than reactionary LP haters give it credit for). Omarion's "Ice Box" is the first subtly R&Bemo song of its kind.

///

One of the benefits of living in New York, I mean besides gastronomical delights and astronomical rents, is the annual New Yorker festival, which positions global ingénues in potentially amazing conversations with New Yorker writers. This year, I attended two music-related interview/performances: Polly Jean Harvey in conversation with Hilton Als, and Gustavo Santaolalla (essentially the Phil Spector of Latin America) in conversation with Jon Lee Anderson. The quality of these conversations seriously depend on the dynamic between the interviewer and subject; the PJ Harvey/Als convo would have benefited if Als had inquired more about Harvey, and expounded less about himself. On the other hand, Jon Lee Anderson, one of the New Yorker's best writers (GOOGLE HIS ARCHIVE ON LATIN AMERICA), asked carefully phrased questions so Santaolalla could speak on his storied, fascinating life: as a political prisoner in Argentina in the 1970s, as the ostensible inventor of rock en espanol, as a producer for musicians like Juanes, Café Tecuba, Julieta Venegas and Molotov, as the man who scored films such as Motorcycle Diaries, Amoros Perros, and Brokeback Mountain. That interview was an example of the New Yorker at its best: dialogue between two masters of their form, each with a genuine interest in ideas, and countless stories of their own.

PJ Harvey's interview, however, was too much about process, not enough about emotion. The best example of this: When Harvey mentioned that she had, once, witnessed a person die-- "in my arms"-- Als did not ask her to elaborate. He changed the subject. He wanted to discuss the mechanics of writing prose versus the specifics of writing music. His lack of curiosity was frustrating.

Harvey did discuss her early years, and her transition from a visual artist to a musician. Her first band was an Irish folk duo-- "just me and a pennywhistle player," she laughed-- and her recent acquisition of a piano, which has changed the way she writes songs. She offered to play some for us, then, on a guitar, and a piano decorated in glinting white Christmas lights. She played a set about nine songs long and, alternating between instruments, she started with "Mansized" on guitar, her voice intimating unsafe things even at its nicest, with a hint of danger in her undertone.

But she's teaching herself to play the piano, and so when she switched instruments, her entire vibe shifted. In songs like "Rid of Me" and "Water", the subtext beneath the barbs in her voice is that of great vulnerability. But in her newer piano work, the vulnerability is more blatant. Since she is still learning the intricacies of the instrument, her melodies took on the interpretive air of a beginner, while her lyrics picked up the slack, as she wailed the song "Bitter Little Bird" into the heavily reverbed mic: "I will change/ I will transform/ I will turn myself into a bitter bird, bitter when I fly into a garden." The experience of a new instrument has clearly been freeing for Harvey. Not limited by the medium, she's the kind of person who's motivated by expression, as opposed to someone who's fixated on a form. As Gustavo Santaolalla told Jon Lee Anderson, that expressive impulse is a "spiritual flame that, I hope, guides us in trying to make sense of our lives."